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Among the Toraja of highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, mortuary rituals are great performances. Bellowing water buffalo and squealing pigs for sacrifice, colorful displays of ritual architecture, and formal processions of gift-bearing guests set the scene for complex dramas about status, human value, and ties to ancestors, followers, and kin. To Indonesians throughout the archipelago, Toraja rituals have come to represent the cultural identity of this well-known group. Feasts of Honor is an exploration of these rituals, their changing meanings, and the lively dialogues they have sparked within Toraja culture, from the Dutch Colonial period to the recent era of nationalism, tourism, and migration.
 

Fanning the Sacred Flame: Mesoamerican Studies in Honor of H. B. Nicholson contains twenty-two original papers in tribute to H. B. "Nick" Nicholson, a pioneer of Mesoamerican research. His intellectual legacy is recognized by Mesoamerican archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers--students, colleagues, and friends who derived inspiration and encouragement from him throughout their own careers. Each chapter, which presents original research inspired by Nicholson, pays tribute to the teacher, writer, lecturer, friend, and mentor who became a legend within his own lifetime.

Covering all of Mesoamerica across all time periods, contributors include Patricia R. Anawalt, Alfredo López Austin, Anthony Aveni, Robert M. Carmack, David C. Grove, Richard D. Hansen, Leonardo López Luján, Kevin Terraciano, and more. Eloise Quiñones Keber provides a thorough biographical sketch, detailing Nicholson's academic and professional journey. Publication supported, in part, by The Patterson Foundation and several private donors.

The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against the characterizationmore by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture mroe accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant life: fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).

Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the world view from which all social life flows. The concept of fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.

Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a postmodern world.

Annie Zaenen’s research has broadly influenced the field of linguistics from the underlying architecture of formal theories to the minute details of lexical representation. This volume assembles a wide range of essays from linguists who have been profoundly influenced by Zaenen’s work. Taking Zaenen as a model, the contributors explore a variety of topics, including the mapping of syntax onto argument and the relationship between syntax and semantics. From Quirky Case to Representing Space presents new research in linguistics, but also reasserts Zaenen’s crucial role in the evolution of linguistic theory.